CBI can’t probe Goa drug nexus, high court told

The police-politician-drug mafia nexus case cannot be investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as it ‘lacks manpower’ and has ‘constraints of local language’, its officials Tuesday told the Panaji bench of the Bombay High Court.

The federal investigation agency said this in a letter issued to the union ministry of personnel which was placed before Justice S.C. Dharmadhikari and Justice F.M. Reis.

The high court is hearing a petition filed by a student leader for a CBI probe in Goa’s drug mafia-police-politician nexus, in which home minister Ravi Naik’s son Roy has been linked to, by the international media and the Opposition.

Refusing to take up the drug nexus probe, CBI Superintendent (Special Crime Branch) Pramod Mudbhatkal has said in his letter to the deputy secretary of the department of personnel and training (DOPT): ‘The local police have better facilities/infrastructure and local language would not be a barrier to them.’

‘Whereas, the officers of the CBI would have constraints of local language, topography, etc.,’ he added.

There is also lack of manpower in the CBI as many cases have been referred to it by the Supreme Court and other constitutional courts, Mudbhatkal said, adding that the drug nexus case had no inter-state ramifications.

National Students Union of India (NSUI) president Sunil Kavthankar, who filed the petition, was also brutally assaulted by unidentified people days after he started a signature campaign in the students community to demand a central probe in the drug nexus case.

Several policemen as well as two Israeli drug dealers were arrested and subsequently released on bail after a Swedish model and a former girlfriend of a drug dealer uploaded on popular video upload site www.youtube.com incriminating videos in which the drug dealer was seen speaking of how police sell drugs to them.

The model, Lucky Farmhouse, had also said in an interview to an Israeli newspaper that Naik’s son Roy had links with Yaniv Benaim alias Atala, a drug dealer.